Brooklyn Program Erasing Warrants for Low-Level Offenses

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Samuel Price, who had an unresolved ticket for an open container violation, in a line outside St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn last month, waiting for the chance to clear his name.CreditCreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

Some of the people wanted by the courts, like Kevin Allen, 51, had ignored their original summons in a show of defiance.

Others, like Justin Lopez, 17, said they were too poor to pay a fine or to skip work to go to court.

And many, like Van Malloy, 26, said that in the fog of homelessness and drug abuse, they lost track of tickets for things like spitting or riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or staying after hours in a park.

Yet early on a Saturday they stood in line outside a Brooklyn church waiting for the chance to clear their names, even as many of them said they feared they might be walking into a trap that would send them straight to jail.

For Takara Bey, 32, only the sight of the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, working the line and shaking hands, quelled her fear of a sting.

“That made me feel better,” said Ms. Bey, who had a warrant stemming from a trespassing charge.

New York City has 1.2 million open warrants for all manner of small offenses. Some date back to the 1970s. In Brooklyn, they number 260,000, accumulating at a rate of about 16,000 a year.

Increasingly, legislators, judges and others are asking why summonses for such minor offenses have ended up entangling so many people, saddling them with arrest warrants and often encumbering their job prospects.

Mr. Thompson is trying to help, embracing an idea that has been tried as far away as Tulsa, Okla., and as near as Jersey City, but never embraced widely in New York as the proper way to deal with the backlog.

In July, he wrote to Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat, arguing that the program, Begin Again, would help free police officers to chase more serious crime and would limit the jail population. And at a time when the mayor was working to improve police-community relations, it would also help establish trust with the communities that have borne the brunt of years of zero-tolerance policing — and the disproportionate penalties for low-level offenses, he said.

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Judge Cenceria Edwards presided in a makeshift courtroom in the basement of the church.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

But unlike amnesty, Mr. Thompson said, his program forces people to take a measure of responsibility. They have to decide to deal with the issue: get up on a Saturday, visit a place teeming with the authorities and wait in line. Only then can they emerge with a clean record.

It is one front in a broader push for changes in the criminal justice system. From Baltimore to Ferguson, Mo., to Brooklyn, the scrutiny on law enforcement over the past year has given new light to longstanding inequities, and new energy to reform efforts.

In New York, the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, proposed overhauling a two-tiered bail system that keeps poor defendants in jail at Rikers Island and wealthier ones free. A new law in New York City prohibits employers from asking, on initial job applications, about a person’s criminal history.

By dealing with the warrants, Mr. Thompson said he thought he could help thousands of people — most black or Hispanic, and most of them young — eliminate crippling obstacles to finding work or housing, obtaining educational aid or even renting a car.

“This is the story of Ferguson,” said Alexander T. Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University who has studied the lessons of such programs, often called “Safe Surrender,” around the country. “The story of people who have become separated from the criminal justice system and are afraid of interacting with it.”

A Justice Department inquiry after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson described a place where many people saw small violations unnecessarily mushroom into far larger legal problems.

The effort in Brooklyn, though, is inherently limited, and that is its biggest shortcoming, one expert said.

“It is a positive thing, in that it recognizes the problem,” said Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.

“But ultimately, it is a Band-Aid on a cancerous tumor; it is a fly swatter that you’re using to combat a fire-breathing dragon,” he said. “It is not, in any serious way, going to address the problem that is discriminatory and abusive and targets African-American and Latino New Yorkers engaging in activities that are essentially decriminalized in white communities.”

Mr. Thompson said he had heard those concerns. He must move to help “as many people as we can,” he said, by lifting the burden of open warrants off their shoulders and forcing a dialogue on a system he sees as in crisis.

“Everything starts somewhere,” he said.

Mr. Thompson has yet to hear back from the de Blasio administration.

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The Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, greeting people in line outside the church. Mr. Thompson said his program forces people to take a measure of responsibility.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

Last month, Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, in a letter to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, argued for Justice Department grants for such programs across the country, citing the department’s report on Ferguson, which found that warrants for low-level violations were routinely issued “not on the basis of public safety needs” but to arrest those who failed to pay fines used to fund government.

At his first Begin Again event, in June, 1,039 people showed up at a church in Clinton Hill; 675 summonses were cleared. At the second one, on Sept. 12, at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York, 786 people came; 652 cases were cleared.

Some people had more than one summons; others had none. A few had parking tickets or other low-level matters, and a small number of people had misdemeanor warrants, which lawyers for the Legal Aid Society handled by giving them return dates.

With each event costing about $30,000, Mr. Thompson is planning more, possibly in partnership with foundations and nonprofit groups that are seeking reforms.

To encourage participation, the State Office of Court Administration mailed letters, on church letterhead, to about 1,000 addresses in Brooklyn where some warrants originated.

But Mr. Thompson, knowing most people show up never having received a letter, made his pitches more personal, with appearances on several radio stations, including WBLS-FM and WQHT-FM, and visits to barbershops, churches and street fairs.

A summer concert at Wingate High School is where Mr. Allen learned about the program. He showed up for Begin Again to clear up a warrant stemming from a disorderly conduct summons he received three years ago after a barbecue at the Tilden Houses in Brownsville.

Minutes after arriving at St. Paul Church, he was standing near a prosecutor, in front of Judge Cenceria Edwards in the basement of the church. She dismissed the matter and told him, “Good luck, sir.”

He stepped outside. It was his birthday. Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” was blaring on loudspeakers. Volunteers were preparing barbecues for lunch.